This blog entry by Jeff Thurston, which describes the integration of the real world with the virtual, has echoed something that I often think about and try to show to people with video concepts because I just can't find the words to describe it. In Jeff's words:

While the article points out that imagery is now being collected horizontally, to enable realistic building facades and so on, one might very well argue that even that will not survive much longer as CCTV are now growing in number, covering just about every angle in most major cities. Perhaps real-time 3D at the street level is next up, in which case we will be walking through videos, rather than still images.

He's absolutely right, and I created a short video with the help of a clip from USC showing a simulated transition from satellite, to aerial, to 3D and finally to integrated "real" video stitched into the "virtual" world. Check it out.

Longer Example Of Fusing Video With Virtual Worlds

The MSNBC Rising from Ruin web site put together after hurricane Katrina used some virtual 360 degree pictures and videos to document some of the stories in Louisiana. They sent a team from Microsoft that was doing work in this area, and they performed the data capture and processing. The really neat thing about the video is that, while it is static in time, every user can stream it to their local system and pan the camera manually for a full 360 degree view, while simultaneously viewing their location on a Virtual Earth map.  

While anything is possible, there are many challenges to his concept of providing a real-time video walk-through,  not the least of which is the question of how the camera will move independently for every user of the system. I'm sure the answer will have something to do with quantum theory.

The German Government has released some 3D buildings in Google Earth. According to the site, approximately 10% of the city is modeled, amounting to about 44,000 buildings!

Following is a 2 minute clip of the experience from Washington, DC.

This is great news for the virtual earth community, as it proves that third party community contribution can really work. There are also some caveats to be learned from this model.

• The experience is very different from other Google-supported areas like Denver (video)
• There are multiple detail levels depending on the importance or architectural significance of the building in question
• Performance is dependent on where the models come from - in this case we assume a server in Berlin
• Rather than show all of the buildings at once, they have implemented their own "performance algorithm" that shows buildings in a narrow field of view

From the announcement:

In order to convey an impression of the cityscape of Berlin, some 800 facades across the city were photographed and the remaining building models textured - that is, assigned a facade - at random using these photos.

Personally, I don't want an "impression" of a cityscape. If I were a city planner, emergency manager or tax assessor, I would want to ensure that the building I was looking at is accurate both in geometry as well as texture, especially for those buildings that people don't look at every day. I also noticed that there is no "collision detection" on the buildings (i.e. as you get close to them, there are no obstructions, allowing you to inadvertently fly right through them.) And I assume it's a graphics driver glitch, by the buildings seemed to float about 300 feet above the ground on my system.

That aside, this is still a momentous achievement for which the team should be proud. It would be very interesting to know how many people contributed, how much it cost and how long this effort took, in order to gauge how long we'll have to wait for similar cities to be "born".

The Microsoft Virtual Earth team has automated the 3D building process with a pipeline that takes aerial imagery on one side, and through a photogrammetric process spits out highly accurate textured models on the other side in approximately 7 days (average 200 sq. km.) But I haven't yet seen a city with 44,000 buildings in it!

The nice thing about the Microsoft process is that you can be assured of the quality and performance of the buildings, including in highly dense urban areas such as this part of Boston's North End.

The image on the left is in Virtual Earth 3D, and the image to the right is in 2 dimensional Bird's Eye mode. Click on the images to see these areas in Virtual Earth.

This is all great progress on the road to creating a true 3D world. Great work Berlin!

I'm just catching up on blogs from the last couple of weeks and noticed Steve Lombardi's post on Virtual Earth 3D buildings video with Duncan Lawler of the MS Virtual Earth team.

So I was flying around Denver in 3D with the Road style turned on, and I began to notice some buildings way outside of the downtown area - like 15 miles south! That's one of the nice things about the Road style - with its light-colored background the buildings really pop. Make sure you turn on detail (SHIFT-D) or you'll just see lifeless gray boxes.

It struck me that I had no idea where all the textured buildings were in Virtual Earth, so I spent a few minutes this weekend exploring them. What I learned was that there are literally thousands (perhaps up to 100,000+) fully textured buildings in and around the initial batch of large cities.

Jerry Skaw linked to all of the cities, and I extended his collection with polygons that you can access and save as a Favorite here.

The roadmap at left shows the greater Denver area. The red pushpins are downtown Denver as shown in the example above. The rest of the area (20Miles x 5Miles) contains thousands of textured 3D buildings. In comparison, as of November 2006, the entire Second Life universe had about half as much territory as a single Virtual Earth city! Google Earth also has some nice textured buildings in downtown Denver, but they're limited to a small area neighborhood depicted by the pushpin.

My question of the day: when will television stations in the modeled areas start to use Virtual Earth in their broadcasts, instead of showing us lifeless gray buildings?

On Jeff Henshaw's Hog Blog, show's an interesting Virtual Earth mashup to explore some of the best riding spots in the US.

This time indoors. I put Virtual Earth and Photosynth together as an example of outdoor to indoor exploration.

 
Video: Virtual Earth and Photosynth - Zoom Indoors

This is an example of linking Microsoft's Virtual Earth and Photosynth technologies to create a totally immersive world exploration experience. Note that Photosynth is not yet available, except as a technology preview, but as Robert Scoble pointed out, it certainly has a "wow" factor! Check it out when you have a chance and suggest ways you could use it.

Among the top contenders I've heard from both consumers and business people:

• Travel - see the St. Peter's example below
• Law Enforcement - reconstruct a crime scene
• Military/NGOs - response to natural disasters (e.g. including timeline photo comparisons)

 
Video: Virtual Earth and Photsynth Tour of St. Peter's Basilica

Video of Virtual Earth 3D in San Francisco - another example of custom programming on top of Virtual Earth like the previous "Flight Simulator" simulator post. This one sends Ghosts into the atmosphere and was used by a Microsoft developer to explore using 3D actors in the managed control - more info on how to program the Virtual Earth managed control can be found on Heptazane's stump.

Here is a map of where the video takes place - the pushpins show the start (bottom-right) and end (top left) locations. (Click on the map to launch Virtual Earth centered on San Francisco.)

I've been a huge fan of MS Flight Simulator since the original vector version back in the 80's. Back then I imagined a fully immersive 3D world indistinguishable from the real world. We still have a ways to go, but look how far we've come...I found these at the Flight Simulator Vault...

Miegs Airport, Chicago, 1982 - this was my first view

Miegs Airport, Chicago, Flight Simulator 3 with "clouds"

Flight Simulator X, current state of the art (images from Microsoft)

While the sim looks extremely realistic, it's not. Some of the major skyline buildings have been modeled to provide a sense of being there, and there is an elevation model that shows things like mountains and "grand" canyons. But it's called a "simulator" for a reason.

On the other hand, Microsoft is also building a very realistic and accurate digital representation of the earth called Virtual Earth that doesn't have as many buildings, but has 15cm accuracy for the ones it does have. This gives a hyper-realistic feel to the cities...so I wondered what it would be like to replace the current "mapping" interface with a flight ladder and joystick and zoom over San Francisco at mach 2!

 
Video: Virtual Earth 3D Flight Interface

This example is a preview of the incredible power in the Virtual Earth managed control, which is installed when you select the 3D option and is currently in beta. The managed control is the code that runs in the browser and renders Virtual Earth in 3 dimensions (i.e. like modern computer games that allow you to interact with the world and walk/fly/drive through it.) Once it is released, you can expect a full API and documentation for developers to create their own fully immersive digital earth applications.

What's the first thing you did when you tested Google Maps, Google Earth or Microsoft Virtual Earth?

If you're like me, you went to your house, like Chris Reeder did. But depending on where you live, you have a better experience in one application or another. For example, this is my house in Google Maps at maximum zoom: 

And here it is in Microsoft Virtual Earth using Bird's Eye view looking North, South (and you can also view East/West):

Chris wants better imagery of his house, and he will have it, someday. But it's going to take some time before all the vendors are able to cover the entire earth with recent imagery. I'm lucky that Microsoft has my area.

Google has lots of satellite imagery (i.e "top down") through their exclusive deal with DigitalGlobe, and Microsoft has many cities around the world in 45 degree aerial imagery (like those above) via their exclusive deal with Pictometry, as well as super high resolution images from their new line of UltraCam (a whopping 200+ megapixel!) cameras they got when they purchased Vexcel Corporation in 2006, and they are releasing new imagery every month!

And we haven't even started to talk about maps or 3D buildings, which are beginning to show up in both Google Earth and Virtual Earth, and  are beginning to set the stage for a fully immersive "digital earth" that will blend activities between the real world and the virtual world. Remember the Matrix?

Either way, the value of these systems go well beyond our ability to see our houses from above. With simple and powerful development kits,  these systems are ushering in a whole new category of integrated applications using geographic location as a reference baseline. For example, the Virtual Earth Interactive SDK shown here gives a developer a visual method to choose what they want to do with a map (red box on the left) and then either see the result on the map, view the source JavaScript (to cut/paste into their own application) or review reference material for more granular detail.

It's a great time to be in the digital earth space! What would you do with it, if you could have your way? 

I only did this to see if there was actually a difference in performance and quality, according to Nathan's post in response to Frank's comment.

I thought Nathan was objective, and I concur with much of his analysis. The Google Earth buildings look really colorful and the lighting facing east is better than Virtual Earth. Microsoft will need to work on the lighting and shadows issue - to be fair, here is the same picture Nathan used, but facing west - as you can see, it is significantly better.

Microsoft Virtual Earth 

It all depends on where the shadows are cast. Microsoft shows the image with the sun rising, and Google (below) shows the image with the sun setting.

Google Earth

Frank was right on as well when he said that Microsoft is investing a lot of money to create the most realistic digital earth available. I could be wrong on the number of buildings in Denver, but I estimated around 300 textured buildings for Google Earth, compared with 6,657 in Virtual Earth (confirmed with the Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D team.) I'm open to changing it to a more exact number if Google would like to supply it.

I had to zoom way out to capture many of the Virtual Earth buildings. The previous images were taken in the red box below. Note that it was only one small part of the greater Denver area, which spans several hundred square kilometers. Virtual Earth textured buildings cover the whole image below.

There are currently 30 cities of this quality in Virtual Earth today, and more are being added every month (e.g. Miami in time for the Super Bowl). I can't wait to see New York, and Chicago, and London, and Paris, and Berlin, and Tokyo, and Sydney...

Yes, I live in the greater Washington, DC area, and I thought it would be nice to map the Marine Corps Marathon. After mapping it, I switched to 3D mode in Virtual Earth to "fly" the course from a helicopter perspective, which you can view below. I have to say, running the marathon this way is WAY easier - I didn't even break a sweat.

 
Video: Virtual Earth 3D Marine Marathon

Just playing around with MapCruncher again today and draped an image of the moon from ASU's Space Exploration Resouces on top of Virtual Earth.

Here's what it looks like and you can run your own version here (note that IE 6/7 is currently required for 3D).

 
Video: Virtual Moon

*Tip - by some quirk in the web page, sometimes when you select the 3D option, you'll see the globe at a large distance. Zoom in a couple of levels before switching to 3D, or if you're already stuck, simply hit the Page Down key a couple of times to zoom.

Since I draped the image over the current version of Virtual Earth, an artifact you will notice is how much faster the VE earth tiles load before the Moon tiles from the S3 services. The nice thing about 3D is that the images stream together, so you don't see the underlying tiles before the new ones are blended in.

Using MapCruncher was easy. Posting the 5000 files to Amazon's S3 service and resetting the ACL's was the most difficult part. I used John Spurlock's NS3 Manager, but it hangs frequently when trying to set a large volume of ACL entries. I haven't seen a lot of tools for S3, and the last update from John's page was in May 2006.

The nice thing about S3 is its price - you can store and serve up gigabytes of data for pennies a month. Nice system, but they cater mostly to developers, who are putting interesting applications together, some of which you can see in their solutions catalog.

I was perusing Miami in Google Earth today, and came across the following 3D model of Dolphin Stadium. It looked a bit odd to me, so I fired up Virtual Earth to compare...

This is from Google Earth:

And in Virtual Earth:

The colors are much richer in Google Earth because it is a hand-drawn model from the 3D Warehouse. The Virtual Earth version looks more realistic, in my opinion, because it is created using a photogrammetric process from aerial photos (not to mention that it has a football field in the center!)

The city of Miami also looks very different. The following is from Google Earth:

And this one from Virtual Earth:

It's game day folks - what's the score?

We had a family event this weekend, and one of my guests was raving about his new "Crackberry" (he's a DC lawyer who's completely addicted to his email device).

I figured he was going to show off his new Pearl, but this is what he pulled out of his pocket.

I asked if he knew what this device was, and he replied, "yes, it's  a high-end version of the Blackberry".

Sticking an image on a map is easy, but registering an image on a map and generating the requisite tiles out of it so that users can navigate your image on an underlying basemap is something altogether different. This is the role of Mapcruncher, and while I've used similar tools in the past, Mapcruncher was by far the easiest to use.

I created a video tutorial of a mapcrunch session in which I took an image of detroyed villages in Darfur, registered the map in Mapcruncher, and output the results to a web server. Check it out and enjoy crunching your own maps!

  
Video: 5 Minute Mapcruncher Tutorial

Link to MSR MapCruncher

David Luna wrote a thought-provoking question the other day after viewing some ads in Virtual Earth. His basic premise is around applying real-world concepts such as land preservation to the virtual world...and that's a very interesting concept.

I responded to his note, but wanted to explore the topic a bit further and solicit other input. So put on your thinking caps and join me for a sip of ale.

Virtual Earth can be considered at the point of the Garden of Eden...or a tad earlier in its development cycle. Yes, there are buildings and roads, but not yet covering the entire globe. The sun does not rise nor set, but casts a variety of shadows across buildings and landscape that make it nearly impossible to determine the time of day!

After flying flight simulators for so many years, Virtual Earth is deathly quiet to me. Yes, I fly through the landscape with my handy Xbox 360 PC controller, and it's quite satisfying to view real cities as opposed to the auto-generated ones of Flight Simulator.

So what are the positives?

1. Beautiful scenery
2. Big 3D textured cities
3. Clean...no pollution
4. No established political systems
5. No established religious systems
6. No taxes
7. No wars
8. Quiet
9. Accurate (buildings to within 15 cm)
10. Platform focus for developers

Let's keep it to 10 for now. And the negatives?

1. Not enough beautiful scenery (but rapidly increasing with monthly updates - 20TB in December alone!)
2. Not enough international coverage or 3D cities
3. Too clean - doesn't model the real world
4. Limited social interaction and engagement
5. No commerce system or in-world currency
6. Quiet - there should be an immersive sound checkbox to  pick up either existing or simulated sounds in cities, rural areas, beaches, etc.
7. In conjunction with 6, should have seamless VOIP for in-world social interaction - e.g. meet me at {permalink} and when we get in range, allow our voices to be heard - sort of like in real life.
8. Limited developer APIs at present
9. Too closely linked to search - Virtual Earth can be much bigger than search. Look what IBM is doing with Circuit City in Second Life.
10. Your thoughts?

If you were to create a digital earth representation of the real earth for business, government and consumers, what parts of the real world would you include and which would you prevent from ever entering "your" world?

From the author:

Here is compiled a full list of software which must be downloaded. Yep, every one of them. All of these are brilliant in every way, shape and form and are just plain brilliance. OK you don’t have to download them, but all of these are free except where stated, and are just great. Download ahoy!

Some I already had, but I downloaded another bunch here!

Thanks for the list Zack!

Here is some new content you should see in the latest version of Virtual Earth. It takes time to build the earth...

Oblique "Bird's Eye" imagery (without the dreaded "Brady Bunch" navigation window!)

· Pima, AZ (Tucson)

· Alameda, CA (Oakland)

· Contra Costa, CA (Walnut Creek)

· Sacramento, CA (Sacramento)

· San Mateo, CA (South San Francisco)

· Santa Barbara, CA (Santa Barbara)

· Sonoma, CA (Santa Rosa)

· Santa Clara, CA (San Jose)

· Adams, CO (Denver)

· Arapahoe, CO (Denver)

· Hillsborough, FL (Tampa)

· St. Louis, MO (St. Louis)

· Essex, NJ ( Newark)

· Jersey Shore, NJ (Jersey Shore)

· Washoe, NV (Reno)

· Monroe, NY (Rochester)

· Nassau, NY  (Long beach)

· Onondaga, NY (Syracuse)

· Suffolk, NY (Smithtown)

· Suffolk, NY (Smithtown)

· Hamilton, OH (Cincinnati)

• New Hi-Res city orthos for Virtual Earth 3D
  • Orange, Torrance, IrvingTX, Minneapolis, Sacramento, Cincinatti, additional Boston, Garden Grove, Huntington Beach, Irvine CA (includes Santa Ana), and Tacoma, additional LA (3&4), StPaulMN, Anaheim.
• New 3D cities (buildings/textures/dems)
• Minneapolis, MN
• 
• St. Paul, MN
•  
• Sacramento, CA
•  

Italy orthos (1m TerraItaly) of the entire country

• Including Bird's Eye...

Also, don't forget the drawing tools in the scratchpad (by opening Collections above the map). Selecting the line tool at the bottom and then clicking successive points on the map will also measure the total distance from beginning to end. Make sure you right click on the last point and select "Finish Drawing".

Of course this is a silly use of the measure functionality, but you get the point. In my previous post, I had mapped the entire Marine Corps marathon before this measurement capability was available. The day this feature came out, I went back to that collection and suprise - it came out to 26.87 miles. I'm sure the error is all mine with approximate turns and some fuzzy areas that I wasn't sure exactly where the course went. But overall - pretty darned good.

There is also a new collection "properties" box that allows you to make your collection public and allow it to be discovered by internet search engines, but I haven't tested this functionality yet.

Overall, lots of new imagery, enhancements and general usability features.

This is so cool...

VE released a new version on Wednesday that allows you to measure things...a while back I created a path for the DC Marine Corps Marathon even before VE 3D was released on November 6th. Since that time, and without any changes to my original path, I have been able to "fly" the route in VE 3D, and now the route is automatically measured for me as follows http://maps.live.com/?v=2&cid=94A64037B5C0FB5C!242

Pretty cool stuff VE team! Keep it coming!

Here we go again. http://strongangel.nga-earth.org is an interesting site. Using Microsoft's SSE (Simple Sharing Extensions), IDV Solutions has integrated data feeds from a variety of sources for display and interaction on a Virtual Earth map.

The beauty of SSE is that it breaks down the barriers between systems, networks and applications in a completely transparent way. You can read more at the link above, but essentially it enables bi-directional RSS feeds.